WDS Preseason and Upcoming Changes

As NC, we don't care about alerts.

Don't turn this into weapon balance thread we have many of those, please find one that fits you best and post there.

You might have missed this in the original post:

The regional tooltips will tell you the resulting value, which takes all of the modifiers into account. That gives you some better indication of what a territory is worth for you to capture or for the owner to hold.

[quote="CEGrif, post: 2154981, member: 96452"]months? u joking? untill GU13 or 14 it was VS who held the NWG on Indar not the TR[/quote]

No, I'm not joking whatsoever. Warpgate rotation usually comes with each GU, right?

Example;
GU10: June 5, 2013
GU11: June 20, 2013
GU12: July 10, 2013
GU13: July 24, 2013
GU14: August 12, 2013
(Information from; http://wiki.planetside-universe.com/ps/Patches)

It's now the 25th of September. It's been over 6 weeks since last GU, when it is usually around 2-3 weeks between them, and there is still no sign of GU15.

We've had the Northern warpgate for 6 weeks, not the months you implied earlier. I also remember TR having the South-east warpgate for 3 months, which just happened to be the time when VS were massively overpopped and simpy overran every outpost because of ZOE MAXes

Aww yissss!

In response to the general concern of the alert bonus which several players have voiced, I want to emphasize that the point values are adjustable and will certainly be tuned. If it doesn't get the result we want we can either disable it or adjust the values. We understand the concern but we also want to see how it plays out and if it achieves the desired result. The primary goal of the preseason is to learn what the tuning values should be, so this is our best time to experiment and make the most of it. There will be tuning here and we'll be watching the data and feedback and respond accordingly just as we have with the other concerns.


We decided not to put the difficulty modifier on alerts for a few reasons:
1) It's easy to grief/deny the winning team by leaving a continent at the end of the alert and denying them the points.
2) It rewards avoiding alerts, which perpetuates the problem with them.

The issue with alerts is largely cultural. When they were first released alerts were praised and were great fun and tons of positive feedback from players. However, over time between players hopping to the faction they perceive will win and the other groups intentionally avoiding or not caring about the alerts we have situations where empires will win an alert because others didn't show up or because a significant population shift occurred. And that encourages even more avoidance and hopping and the problem gets to where we are now with some server and faction communities not really participating at all and so when alerts occur it leads to population shifts and makes things worse all around.

The approach we're trying is to correct the behavior through empire loyalty (so there's less hopping) and making Alerts more meaningful to the WDS (so there's less avoidance). That addresses the problem from both ends and tries to get us back to the place we were when alerts were first introduced - lots of participation, lots of fun, and rewarding.

Alerts can be great to off-peak WDS scoring for all empires since they are intended to help focus efforts on a single continent, boosting that continent's population and thus its scoring value. Even in a situation where one empire has a large population, that's a golden opportunity for the other empires to score a lot of WDS points off-peak, while the larger population empire is getting less during that time. But that only works if players are motivated to participate and not avoid them. That's what we're trying to improve with this scoring change.

If you really want the avoidance aspect to stop then the losing faction needs motivation for participating in alerts outside of winning. The reason they are avoided is because winning is not an option to these factions so simply making a win worth more is completely pointless.

If alerts there balanced how could player perceive that particular faction would win a alert. Also for player to do any kind of winning faction hoping a trend must be perceived. It isn't largely cultural problem.

They could completely remove XP gains for two hours for anyone that's switched from another faction that they've played for more than 5 minutes? If they're not going to disallow multiple characters they could at least make it worth sticking to one of them!

Well at least it's 1½ month, and because of no sign of GU15, it might as well take 2 more weeks until it shows up. I do not recall that about the 3 months (been playing since April, so I do not know how it was before that, or on beta, or I have forgotten about it as it has been so long). The point still remains. By now I would have thought they would have a more regular warpgate rotation already established, as they used to. I still think it would be fair, to let the NC and VS have same amount of time on NWG, as the TR have had now, and then let it be back to the usual 2-3 weeks.

Or at-least players don't receive alert xp if they switched faction after an incoming alert has been announced (still this can have horrible consequences).

Alright, time to dissect this.

Good stuff, makes sense. But, as everyone is saying, the population imbalance needs to be fixed first.

Ideally you'd just supply enough tools for the players to sandbox their own meta, but if that's too difficult (and I certainly can't list all of the stuff necessary) then this sort of thing is second best.

No mechanic changes is a fair point, but the terrible population imbalance invalidates everything.
I think the 'very few resources' shows.

What prevented you from asking for feedback before forcing this on us? In fact, you _got_ feedback, but you ignored it for the first week. Pre-week1 feedback is no different from post-week1 feedback.

Population imbalance is at the point where, as an above poster mentioned, the underdogs _can't_ fight back. More points for achieving something that's impossible doesn't make for a better game. Even if you do get the scores to balance, are the players supposed to enjoy the actual gameplay? There might be a few who derive their entire enjoyment from seeing a balanced WDS score, but I bet most still enjoy actually fair fights.

Again, balancing score, not balancing the game. I know it takes more resources to fix the map, but that's what you must do. At least try and convince us that you intend to.

This is the same change as you did to alerts, which didn't remove empire hopping.. This is going to make empire hopping worse as players now must spend more time on the winning side to get their benefit. You mention nothing about the underdogs being rewarded, so participation on a losing side is worth nothing, even if you're 100% loyal and play 20 hours a day.

Won't this mean that zerging becomes the ultimate tactic?
The highest population faction needs to pile everyone on to one continent (the one with most enemies), steamroll it fast, then abandon it to go to another continent (the second-most populated, or most populated if the situation changed). The underdogs can either lose on the most populated continent.. or switch continents and gain less points from any successes (while denying the top dogs some points)

This is actually sensible. Or at least I can't immediately see a flaw. Some will argue that giving the underdogs a boost diminishes the importance of organization/skill on all sides. Ideally the playerbase would gang on to the top dog naturally, but we've already seen that the natural choice is to go for the easy target instead.

This is going to benefit the most populated faction. Make sure to put in sensible limits or you might see a faction pile 400 people onto a tiny outpost because it has been held for 3 weeks straight and is now more valuable than the entire rest of the map.

I can't comment on weekly challenges other than that you're asking us to trust you on faith alone again... "We have plans" honestly sounds like "We don't know what we'll do, but we have decided that we'll do something". And we can't give feedback, pre-disaster, if you don't tell us. Delay implementation until a few weeks after you've revealed the plans.

Just make sure this doesn't make the UI hinder performance... Otherwise good.

We practically never interact with the players outside our own server. There can be no competition between servers that's meaningful when no friendships/rivalries form. "They" will mostly be a mass of faceless and nameless people, which are much less enjoyable to fight with/against. You may hear of what they've done, if you're lucky.. but mostly you just see they gained x points, with no idea how.

On the other hand, if you should ever be stupid enough to let players transfer between servers easily, server based rewards could further polarize the population imbalance so that servers become

I still don't see why capturing needs to be awarded at all. It merely leaves open the possibility to game the system by rapid exchange of bases in order to gain more points than holding the territory could generate. That territory becomes more valuable fights against this way of gaming the system to an extent, but only if you can safely assume that the territory truly would be held long enough. Biolabs can potentially be exchanged every 3 minutes, for an hourly score of 1000 points per biolab, compared to the (before time bonus) value of holding it of 40 points per hour.

This is very flawed: Consider 40/40/20 TR/NC/VS population: TR would have MAX(40/popcap, 20/popcap, MinValue), NC would have MAX(40/popcap, 20/popcap, MinValue) and VS would have MAX(40/popcap, 40/popcap, MinValue).. meaning all three factions have the same MAX value picked (40/popcap or MinValue)

The population of the faction itself _must_ come into play on this formula, else it punishes the lowest population.

This is so bad I resorted to using color after thinking about it a while and going into edit mode. I hate colors. But you need to see this.

Combining this with the Runaway Empire above means that, on some servers, the most populated faction gets a bonus for attacking a weaker faction. Example: TR is leading globally, but on server X Vanu have the lead (and highest population).. Vanu would get a bonus for attacking the local underdog TR.

This should be removed.

Wasn't this covered in Depth/Variety above? And I see you did put a limit in, as I suggested above (quick work! ). Remember that Albert Einstein supposedly said 'compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe'. You might want to keep things linear (it's also easier for the average player to understand).

Absolutely not. You don't have to tie everything together, and making winners win more is just generally bad.

Continent-specific madness: Subject to warpgate rotation imbalances, as such a terrible idea. Even if you ensured each faction has an equal number of weeks where they are in an advantageous position.

Size Always Matters: Same as above, though slightly less so.

Red Alert: Since I already mentioned tying alerts into WDS is a terrible thing, this is doubly terrible.

Molon Labe: Defense may be more rewarding.. but so is attacking. Underdogs will have a much harder time holding on to their territory than the top dogs, hence this provides bonus points to the top dogs. Also the players will absolutely call this the Moron Labe.

Pillage: Capture Value increase over time? If you take a long time to capture a base, you're rewarded more? How does that even make sense? Or do you mean the end of that week would see more points from captures?

Sudden Death: This is only good if the scores are relatively even. If they're not, this is more likely to make the gap larger than smaller.

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That's my feedback, hope you consider it like you promise to. I will be glad to hear further explanations if you consider I've misunderstood something.

edit3(or so): On a funny sidenote, I made a post today before having read this thread, in which I asked another player whether SOE would be likely to balance population or balance score... I did it to be all 'see, I told you so' later on, though it's going to look a little silly now that this was already here.

I think it's about time you put a cooldown on empire hopping. I understand SOE (Higby) stated some reasons for not wanting to do this and some of them are very reasonable. I even agree to a point why there is no cooldown for empire switching. The unfortunate side of that is nothing you are doing or can do will stop the 4th empire. A cooldown should have been there since day 1. In planetside 1 there was a twelve hour cooldown before you could change faction after switching to another empire. People who wanted to hop around a lot made alts on other servers. I don't see how this is such a big deal compared to the already abused system in place. A cooldown would make people think twice about hopping over to another toon on the same server just for the xp bonus and alert rewards; they'd be stuck with that toon for half a day. I know it sounds harsh to some, but the WDS and Alert system has shown the 4th faction jumpers are ruining population balance.

Could you provide a link to the statements you refer to by Higby?

Exactly what Being@RT said above.

Unfortunatly this rant below were already done and I feel I need to vent.

Alerts were a good thing when there were no latice. Becase it focused activity and made it easier to find a good fight. That is not needed anymore so alot of players that don´t bother much with the larger Picture/strategy will just as likely just ignore them and stay were they are. And the free to play model will draws in more ppl that just want to shoot something. So u will never get the large teamwork lvl that were found in PS1. Especially lacking some of the command tools/featurse it had.

I say that Alerts in it´s form doesn´t belong in the game any more. It´s just an overpop faction xp boosting event every other hour. And has for a long time made more harm then good. (At least from alot of players point of view)

And SoEs failiur to step in and counter the pop unbalance that alerts largely are responsible for. Is basicly why so many have became so upset with this 5 week long WDS event.
We´r now stuck with even worse pop unbalance on most servers for these 5 weeks, while SoE "tries to figure out what works".
UNACCEPTABLE!

Basicly u should have known all this already and tried to remedy the pop unbalance. Because u´v had so much time to try implement some countermesures.

All these WDS Point tweaks is not what´s needed. It´s the coregame and the features that reward the overpopulation. Starting with resources and ending with the freaking alerts(And every little thing in between.). This is all just a bandaid on a gushing open wound.
Show me that u can do something about the popunbalance, not making it easier for the underpops to compete in this "WDS" event .. because that´s utterly pointless if the popbalance ain´t adressed first.

I´m sorry if I sound bitter. But this has been going on for too long in so many things. Show us that u understand your own game. And I may see SoE in a better light again.


Edit: Malorn ... big props to u personly for comunicating directly with us. It´s sorly missed around here and very welcome.

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=33030

I'm glad our concerns have finally been acknowledged. These changes are badly needed. Thanks for the effort, SOE.

Many good things and thanks for both reacting quickly and for keeping us informed. I am a big fan of the WDSin general and very happy with most of these ideas. I do have some questions about one point listed below.

Is the increased frequency of alerts during off peak hours intentional? Will the decrease in value associated with lower population offset the point gain by multiple dominating victories?

On Waterson dominating victories often occur at off peak times. It is not uncommon for TR to win four or five dominations in a row in a few hours because the alerts end so quickly (5 minutes was the new record) in the mornings and then another pops up.